Closure This past weekend was a weekend of closure for me. As I prepare to leave the city after almost 17 years and the apartment I’ve lived in for almost 15, we had my two original roommates from this apartment in town for the weekend with their families for a bit of a farewell party. Times certainly have changed – from three single guys to three families and 7, almost 8 kids between us. Sitting around and noting that all three couples had either gotten engaged or first started dating within the confines of Apartment 35B, then saying goodbye as everyone left the apartment for the last time, was a little surreal. But overall, having everyone around was great fun…
Category
Leadership
Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Non-Competes
Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Non-Competes (Note: I just found this post in the “drafts” folder and realize I never put it up! It was written months ago, although I just updated it a bit.) Bijan Sabet kicked off the discussion about non-competes by asserting that they are a barrier to innovation and that they are unenforceable in California anyway, so why bother? Fred continued the discussion and made some good assertions about the value of non-competes, summarizing his points as: Non-competes are very much in the interests of our portfolio companies. But the non-competes need to be tightly defined and the term of the non-compete needs to be paid for by the portfolio company if the employee was forced out of…
7 Years On
7 Years On My last September 11 as a New York City resident. I walked down to the World Trade Center site this morning as I have each of the last six 9/11s and rang The Bell of the Unforgotten, which is the New York City Fire Department’s port-a-memorial that they bring out for the day. As a long-time member of the lower Manhattan community, the day always bring out a lot of reflection for me. Seeing the memorial flood lights on tonight will do the same and bookend the day. The main thing I was thinking about this morning was why there’s been nothing really built yet on the site. World Trade Center 7 (which is actually adjacent to…
Sometimes You Just Need a 2×4 Between the Eyes
Sometimes You Just Need a 2×4 Between the Eyes Freshman year in college, fall semester, my friend Peggy and I were in a small seminar class together on Dante. We thought we were pretty smart before the class started. And that we were great writers. Lots of As in high school. Then we wrote our first paper. Professor Bob Hollander gave me a C-. I think Peggy got a D. We were devastated. And pissed. Sure, the ensuing cocktail took the edge off (this was college, after all), but we both scheduled time with the professor during his office hours to figure out where our carefully honed academic trains had gone off the tracks. Essentially what he said to each…
Back to…
Back to… I’m not in school any more, and as far as I can tell now, schools start before Labor Day for the most part, but it still feels like tomorrow is “back to school” for the working world. Business still hums along in August, and we’ve certainly had our hands full with one of the busiest months ever at Return Path, but somehow, the traditional end of the summer season still manages to have the trappings of a European August, with lots of people on vacation or doing more “work from home” days than usual. As all that draws to a close today, at least for me personally, it’s Back to…lots of things: – Back to New York! After…
Curbing My Enthusiasm
Curbing My Enthusiasm For the first time since I started blogging over four years ago, I have recently run into several examples in a short period of time where I’d love to blog about something happening in the business, and I think it would make for a great blog posting, but I can’t do it. Why can’t I? Lots of different reasons: – Don’t want to telegraph strategy to the competition – Don’t want to compromise an employee (current or former) – Worried about downstream legal ramifications There are other reasons as well, but these are the main three. I love transparency as much as the next person (and more than most), but these scenarios have to trump transparency in…
Book Short: On The Same Page
Book Short: On The Same Page Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points: Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team Create organizational clarity Overcommunicate organizational clarity Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but. The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go…
Book Short: On Employee Engagement
Book Short: On Employee Engagement The first time I ever heard the term “Employee Engagement” was from my colleague David Sieh, one of the better managers I’ve ever worked with. He said it was his objective for his engineering team. He explained how he tried to achieve it. I Quit, But forgot to Tell You, by Terri Kabachnick, is a whole book on this topic, a very short but very potent one (the best kind of business books, if you ask me). It’s got all the short-form stuff you’d expect…a checklist of reasons for disengagement, an engagement quiz, the lifecycle of an employee that leads to disengagement, rules for dealing as a manager. But beyond the practical, the book serves…
Run, Brad, Run!
Run, Brad, Run! A few years ago we announced our support of a charity called the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (see the post about it here and learn more about Accelerated Cure here). While we have a strong culture of giving back to the community at Return Path and do that in several ways, we chose this charity as the main beneficiary of our corporate philanthropy efforts for three reasons: We wanted to support research into finding a cure for MS to honor and support one of our earliest colleagues, Sophie Miller Audette who was diagnosed with MS about 5 years ago (and is still going strong as one of our key sales directors!) – and since then,…
Book Short: How, Now
Book Short: How, Now Every once in a while, I read a book that has me jump up and down saying “Yes! That’s so right!” How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business (and in Life), by Dov Seidman, was one of those books. But beyond just agreeing with the things Seidman says, the book had some really valuable examples and two killer frameworks, one around culture, and one around leadership. It’s a book about the way the world we now live in — a world of transparency and hyper-connectedness — is no longer about WHAT you do, but HOW you do it. It’s about how you can have a great brand and great advertising, but if your…
Inbox = Zero = Satisfying (Quasi Book Short)
Inbox = Zero = Satisfying (Quasi Book Short) I’m a big David Allen fan. Amazingly enough, I haven’t blogged about him and his books yet, probably for the most part because I read the books before I started blogging. But here they are. The first one, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, is probably a little better than the sequel, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, but both are worth reading. When I first read them, they didn’t revolutionize my thinking about productivity and workflow management (I was already at least decent at those things), but they did really sharpen my thinking around the edges and give me a great framework to plug all…